Porn viewing? Don’t folks have anything better to do at work?

I don’t know how scientifically-based the claim is, but a German sex-therapist recently put it out there that “60 million people view adult films on the world’s largest free porn website on a daily basis”, and that two-thirds of the viewing is done on the job. On the somewhat more scientific side, a July Harris survey found that 3 percent of Americans own up to playing a bit of office porn-site peekaboo. (Source: Huffington Post)

As someone who logged time in the web hosting industry, I am well aware that a whole lot of pornin’s always been going on in the Internet industry.

When I was at Genuity, some of our largest clients were porn “providers”.

This presented us with a couple of problems.

First, at a time when bandwidth was not quite as plentiful as it is now, the porn peddlers consumed an inordinate amount of it, depriving legitimate-biz customers like Tiffany and Pets.com of their share.

Second, it didn’t look too good to have porn companies way up there on your client list, especially if you were planning a dazzling IPO.

So we fired our porn customers, which, in one notorious instance, involved a fist-fight between our data center techs and the pornsters we were evicting.

You may not have wanted them on your client list, but it used to be said that porn was what really made the Internet.

But who would have thought that so much of that demand would be coming from use, no in the privacy of the home, but in the public of the workplace?

Anyway, the thought of folks consuming porn at work raises a few pretty obvious questions, especially given that most office workers are in cubicles or open areas.

Not that I’m exactly a porn expert, but the first question is how do you not get caught?

I had two inadvertent brushes with porn viewing on the job, and was in a panic when “it” began appearing on my screen.

In one case, I was at work on a Saturday and decided to take a break by checking out whether the White House had made any comment on the then-brewing Monica Lewinsky scandal. When I typed in whitehouse.com, what to my wondering eyes did appear but all sorts of “adult content.”

Although I was the only one in the office at the time, I couldn’t get to that backspace key fast enough.

My first thought was that the White House site had been hacked.

Then I realized that my mistake had been a .com vs. .gov one.

Fast forward a few years, and I was at Genuity where, in the wake of our dazzling IPO, we were on the eve of implosion.

Along with most of my colleagues, I was a regular visitor to a site called f’d company, which dealt in gossip about, well, f’d companies. Genuity was a frequent guest, and it was always interesting to see what was being said about us.

I wasn’t focusing that closely on what I was doing, and instead of typing in f’d company, I typed in getf’d.

Wow, did I ever. (Well, not literally.)

Bandwidth had greatly improved since I had had my encounter with whitehouse.com, when I was met with nothing more than a scabrous home page.

With getf’d, the images kept popping up, every which way but loose. For a few seconds, I tried to x out those they-can’t-possibly-be-real images, Whack-a-mole style, only to realize there was no way out. Other than a) turning off the screen; b) unplugging the PC.

This occurred around lunch time, and my office was in a well-trafficked area, my desk along a wall that made the screen visible to anyone walking by from that direction. Fortunately, no one was.

So, in my two innocent little porn forays, I was only “on” for a few seconds, and had no witnesses. But if you’re purposefully visiting x-rated sites, how do you not get caught?

Well, in case you’re really wondering, Business Insider provides a handy-dandy set of tips, including getting a screen protector, developing speed with the toggle key, or deploying a foot activated device called a “boss button” that instantly hides what you’re doing by bringing up a work-ish looking screen.

Then there’s: 

Vanishd.com is a service that lets you hide a webpage behind an Excel document that looks work-related. As you move your mouse over the document, a transparent window follows you, letting you see what's underneath.

Any of these tricks could, of course, also be used to mask less sordid activities, like shopping or reading Gawker. But those excursions can easily be explained away, especially if you’re doing them while sitting there with your cup of yogurt and your pear. So the most likely use is to disguise furtive trips down porn alley.

Which brings me to my second question about porn on the job.

Is there not the fact that, when someone is viewing porn, one thing leads inexorably to another? And is that one thing not generally taken care of in the privacy of one’s home, or (in the old days) in the demi-privacy of a seedy movie theater or peep show where, presumably, your manager and co-workers wouldn’t be around to observe you in the act (or, if they were, would be mutually caught out)?

Talk about a major ewwwwwww factor.

And I used to think the guy who borrowed the office WSJ when he made his midmorning visit to the loo was gross.